Do you still have a 5 1/4 floppy drive?

kgruber

kgruber

Final Approach
Joined
Jan 3, 2007
Messages
5,130
Location
Western Washington
Display Name
Display name:
Skywag
If so............may I send you 3 disks...........and would you email me the files?

Thanks.

The floppies have some "Autodesk Animator" files my son made decades ago.. He teaches animation now at Nova school in Seattle

Thanks
 
kgruber said:
If so............may I send you 3 disks...........and would you email me the files?

Thanks.

The floppies have some "Autodesk Animator" files my son made decades ago.. He teaches animation now at Nova school in Seattle

Thanks
Click to expand...
I have a lot of legacy equipment at work that I keep running just in case. Will check for you on Monday to see what I can find. Problem is going to be getting it from an old DOS PC that isn’t on a network. I might be able to move from 5.25 to 3.5 to USB to email.
 
kgruber said:
If so............may I send you 3 disks...........and would you email me the files?

Thanks.

The floppies have some "Autodesk Animator" files my son made decades ago.. He teaches animation now at Nova school in Seattle

Thanks
Click to expand...

I have one and can do that. Send disks with explanation of what a negative tip is and I’ll get the files right back to you.:ihih:
 
Ha, I’m like Matthew. I could read the files for you, but short of transferring them to a cassette tape, I couldn’t do much with them without a great deal of effort. I might have a modem, but I’d need two. Lol
 
Matthew said:
I have a lot of legacy equipment at work that I keep running just in case. Will check for you on Monday to see what I can find. Problem is going to be getting it from an old DOS PC that isn’t on a network. I might be able to move from 5.25 to 3.5 to USB to email.
Click to expand...

luvflyin said:
I have one and can do that. Send disks with explanation of what a negative tip is and I’ll get the files right back to you.:ihih:
Click to expand...

Salty said:
Ha, I’m like Matthew. I could read the files for you, but short of transferring them to a cassette tape, I couldn’t do much with them without a great deal of effort. I might have a modem, but I’d need two. Lol
Click to expand...

I can also include a SD flash memory card.
 
Depending on the quality of the disks, and how they’ve been stored, there’s a chance they can’t be read at all.
 
kgruber said:
I can also include a SD flash memory card.
Click to expand...

I don’t really have one, just gettin a zinger in. Anyway have you tried Computer Repair guys. I’ve found them before with a Google search and found ones who work out of their house. When I took my Computer to them their ‘office’ was filled with all kinds of ancient stuff. Might be worth a try. Good luck
 
kgruber said:
I can also include a SD flash memory card.
Click to expand...
If I can read them I can find a way to transfer them to something else so I can zip and email. I do have 3.5 drives and disks, but I really can’t remember if I have a 5.25. I think I do, but I am not sure.
 
All you youngsters sending zingers have no idea of how happy we were to move from cassette and punched paper tape to floppies. Software was efficient back then because it needed to be. Now its just hacks cobbling together code they find on github and calling it "engineering.? Sigh.
 
Arnold said:
All you youngsters sending zingers have no idea of how happy we were to move from cassette and punched paper tape to floppies. Software was efficient back then because it needed to be. Now its just hacks cobbling together code they find on github and calling it "engineering.? Sigh.
Click to expand...

I still have a couple sleeves of eprom I can transfer those files onto.

I still remember the time someone came over to me and said an eprom didn’t work. He said, “I plugged it in and turned it on. The light came on for a second and then turned off.”

I told him that plugging those things in backwards turns them into a fuse and programmed up another one.
 
kgruber said:
If so............may I send you 3 disks...........and would you email me the files?

Thanks.

The floppies have some "Autodesk Animator" files my son made decades ago.. He teaches animation now at Nova school in Seattle

Thanks
Click to expand...

you might want to indicate the types of 5 1/4 floppies you have... hard-sectored? SSDD? DSHD? OS?
 
5 1/4" floppies? Too small!
upload_2021-4-10_11-1-28.png
My old Commodore 128 used 5 1/4" floppies, but it was a proprietary format. There was a program called "Big Blue Reader" that would copy them in IBM format.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Meh - I remember hauling around RK05 disks and others like them.

rk05-align-pack-60.jpg


14" bad boys that held 2.5 MB.

And don't forget the Bernoulli boxes.
 
I have a couple of 8" drives, but I don't think they'll work with your disks.
 
Email should be doable, I think they were like 512kb max, or something like that?
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
Email should be doable, I think they were like 512kb max, or something like that?
Click to expand...
Few devices with 5 1/4 drives have modern networking capabilities much less email capability.
 
Arnold said:
All you youngsters sending zingers have no idea of how happy we were to move from cassette and punched paper tape to floppies. Software was efficient back then because it needed to be. Now its just hacks cobbling together code they find on github and calling it "engineering.? Sigh.
Click to expand...

Cassettes? Those were leading edge!
I remember doing Fortran programming using decks of punch cards. Each program held together with elastic bands so the cards would stay in order for loading into the reader.
 
Salty said:
Few devices with 5 1/4 drives have modern networking capabilities much less email capability.
Click to expand...

yeah, I just meant that you wouldn’t need to put em on a thumb-drive or zip to snail mail.
 
Assuming they are MS-DOS disks there are still two common formats used. The original PC and XT and clones used double sided drives with a capacity of 360K (DD), and the AT (286) and clones came with drives that held 1.2M bytes (HD). A very few early PCs has single sided or 320k double sided disks. I will ignore these.

The HD disks cannot be read in the DD drives. I looks like the 1.2M HD drives can read the 360k disks but not reliably write to them.

There is more detail here.
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1265050503299297280 -- foone is very reliable.
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=44654

The 360k disks are probably marked DD and the 1.2M HD.

"5.25" DD: 360k
5.25" HD: 1.2m"

So, if someone has an HD drive (1.2M) they should be able to read whatever you have.

There will be commercial services for this. A quick look turns up
http://www.datarecoverymasters.com/apages/5-14-floppy-disk-transfer-to-usb-flash-drive/
$17 each.
 
And you always had a couple rubber bands on your wrist, too.
 
kgruber said:
If so............may I send you 3 disks...........and would you email me the files?

Thanks.

The floppies have some "Autodesk Animator" files my son made decades ago.. He teaches animation now at Nova school in Seattle

Thanks
Click to expand...
You still looking for a 5.25" drive?

I did find one, but it's going to take a little while for me to tear it out of the husk it's bolted into and then plug it into an old DOS PC to see if it works.


Edit:

found one

7BB276EA-841C-425A-8033-98B5A53A31F1.jpeg
 
Last edited:
Matthew said:
You still looking for a 5.25" drive?

I did find one, but it's going to take a little while for me to tear it out of the husk it's bolted into and then plug it into an old DOS PC to see if it works.


Edit:

found one

View attachment 95499
Click to expand...

Matthew.............thank you for going through that old PC pile!!
If you message me your address, and if the drive works, I'll mail them off.
this is a little Wiki about my son..........and the 1st animations are on those 51/4 disks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Gruber
 
kgruber said:
Matthew.............thank you for going through that old PC pile!!
If you message me your address, and if the drive works, I'll mail them off.
this is a little Wiki about my son..........and the 1st animations are on those 51/4 disks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Gruber
Click to expand...

It might be a day or so for me to install and test. I don’t want to put this all together only to find out it destroyed the floppies. Your son might have better access to a data recovery place that can do this with a faster turn around.

edit:

now I have to find a power strip.

EE1FE6F1-1DF6-49A3-B1FA-21D062BCCB0A.jpeg

edit: doesn’t look like it’s getting power. The rest of the PC powers up and I’m using the same power cable connected to the 3.5” but the 5.25” isn’t coming up. Will try a few more things but it doesn’t look good.

edit: I found another 5.25”
drive but I will need to tear it out of the shell it’s in.
 
Last edited:
I'll need to round up a VGA monitor tomorrow to see what's going on. I did connect another 5.25" but still don't see any signs of life. It's possible the CMOS settings were only configured for a hard drive and 3.5" drive so it may not be recognizing that 5.25" drive. I'll get a monitor and check on that. I know the last time I powered up that old PC the motherboard battery was dead so any settings would have either been lost or are now at default. I haven't given up yet.
 
I have a working PC with a 5-1/4 inch drive and USB ports. The 5-1/4 inch drive reads both low density and high density disks, including double-sided. I could use one of my USB sticks to transfer the files to one of my computers with email capability. I would be happy to help.
 
Last edited:
A fun fact.

So, the guy that developed the first (successfully) commercialized floppy hardware controller was a fellow named John Torode.

We know him for a couple of different, later projects: He's the guy that started Dynon, and more recently Vashon Aircraft.
 
Palmpilot said:
I have a working PC with a 5-1/4 inch drive and USB ports. The 5-1/4 inch drive reads both low density and high density disks, including double-sided. I could use one of my USB sticks to transfer the files to one of my computers with email capability. I would be happy to help.
Click to expand...

Palmpilot........THANKS!! If you would send me your address I'll ship them out. I'm skywagon at that google email place!
 
TonyG said:
A fun fact.

So, the guy that developed the first (successfully) commercialized floppy hardware controller was a fellow named John Torode.

We know him for a couple of different, later projects: He's the guy that started Dynon, and more recently Vashon Aircraft.
Click to expand...


Reminds me of Bill Lear!
 
I know this is a hobby project. But if it was a real world application, I would use these guys: https://www.ontrack.com/en-us They once recovered a 200 GB drive for me in the 90s. They also recovered some SunOS tape backups for me in the 2000s.
 
In a box I opened today
 

Attachments

  • 06CD5E42-CD76-4AB3-B417-0FCBC2941193.jpeg
    06CD5E42-CD76-4AB3-B417-0FCBC2941193.jpeg
    90.1 KB · Views: 50
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top